More real, less illusion

Hatte, i share autosomal DNA with a multitude of 3rd, 4th, 5th, and "distant" cousins, according to FTDNA. This is not unusual in my family. Our endogamy is well attested and consists not only of typical Jewish frst and second cousin marriages but also of brother-sister pairs married to sister-brother pairs who then had offsping who married one another. At FTDNA i can create whole blocks of matches that match matches that match matches, using the FTDNA relationship grid tool. I am not proud of this, just saying that it is the case. One of my known second cousins came up at 23 and Me as my daughter's first cousin, despite the "levelling" that these companies try to perform on Ashkenazi Jews.

But, be that as it may, here at Geni, my family, and all i have been told about it. is labelled a "myth" now, while the company has a Master Profile for Lucifer, who is listed as the half brother of Eve and the Archangel Michael -- and all i see here are smug chuckles. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I again register my complaint that the Horowitz line was broken without consulting family members. That is not the way crowd-sourcing is meant to work, nor concensus building.

I would like to request a temporary copy of the old tree to be made available to family members, so that we can make personal copies of it, now that Geni has made it inaccessible to the public. This could be accomplished by announcing to us a set time period of a few hours during which it would be made available for copying. After that we could all go or separate ways.

To whom may i make this request? Would Mike Stangl be the appropriate person?

Sure, what you just wrote does not contradict what I wrote. I said that I share DNA with a 6th cousin once removed -- and a large segment. I believe that it's possible that up to 10th cousins will show up with shared autosomal DNA. But that is a couple of hundred of years, not 500 years.

No need to teach me about endogamous marriages. My great grandparents were cousins and nearly every Frankel and Margolis marriage on my paternal grandmother's family tree was a cousin marriage of some sort. This is entirely standard in Ashkenazi families by the way. Especially rabbinical families living in small villages.

I suggest that you (1) read the article that was published in Avotaynu and (2) take up your issues with the author of the article.

It's okay to have whatever tree one wants on your personal computer. You can download the family to the place where the one connection was severed and then download from that place down to you. And re-connect them on your computer.

Crowd sourcing does not mean the majority wins, it means that crowds can and often do contribute improvements, but research and sources are critical, it's not about how many erroneous trees there are out on the Internet if there is no evidence and in fact there is counter evidence. I'm not talking necessarily about this instance, but in general, in response to your comment on crowd sourcing. I'm sure you did not mean it the way it sounded.

I did not say that crowd sourcing implies majority rule. I said that we were not sent notices. Something about discussion among those affected was overlooked or conducted outside our notice. According to the social patterns i was taught, that is unmannerly, and manners are important when working collectively.

Interestingly enough, although Yigal Burstein was listed as the person to contact on these pages and the pages were semi-protected "due to vandalaism on the Horowitz tree," the change was made by Randy, not Yigal.

Catherine, it seems you might be misunderstanding some of the core principles of Geni. It is the responsibility of individual users to Follow the profiles that interest them and to monitor the discussions linked to those profiles.

If Geni were to attempt an individual notification to all users every time an ancestral line changed because bad information is being corrected it would be sending hundreds of thousands of messages a day.

Every descendant of Charlemagne, for example, would have to be given notice every time his fake connection to Julius Caesar was cut.

Geni currently believes I have something like 69 thousand known ancestors. While the real number is certainly very high, this number is absurd. It has to include many fake lines. I follow the ones that interest me and pay no attention to the others. Someone else will do the cleanup on those.

That's the beauty of Geni. But, to make it all work, I have to take personal responsibility. You and every other user of Geni must do the same.

If it were "my responsibility" i would re-make the broken link.

Like you, i would rather deal with a theoretical but "very high" number of ancestors than a uselessly small set. I would note their doubtfulness and let them stay.

Meanwhile, having been given the data as to where Randy performed the link-severing, i have grabbed what little i could, in the form of flat text files. Unfortunately, i do not have the time or financial resources to recreate the information in database format.

Catherine Anna Manfredi Yronwode, the broken link was cut for lack of evidence. In order to argue for restoring it on Geni, you have to find evidence to support it.

If you want gedcom format files, it's possible to generate that. (If you don't know how to handle gedcom format files, I'm afraid I can't help you.)

Note: Rabbi Joseph HaLevi is 16 generations away from Catherine.

At 12 generations (the farthest HerokuApp lets me count), he has 2415 descendants listed on Geni.

I have no easy way to count the number of Geni users descended from him.

Harald, if the database is searchable in the normal way, one would only need to run a search on a couple of terms. I routinely handle a database with 52,500 clients, 5,000 products, 119,000 invoices, and so forth and so on. It can take up to 5 minutes to run a complex multi-field sort, such as "all retail packages shipped via USPS to Rhode Island between 2007 and 2016 in which the total product value was more than $200.00, one of the products was a small cowrie shell bracelet, and on which California sales tax was charged in error" -- it's just a database, after all. Whoever is programming the Geni database can set the search parameters. It need not be done by a curator using an outside app.

Getting back to your real point, that "the broken link was cut for lack of evidence," if that were the way Geni operated, why would the genealogies in the Bible be taken as evidence. Even if they were the best practices" stammbaums of their era, the logging of the early data onto Biblical scrolls took place many generations after the birth of Adam and Eve, and you know it. Yet there the lineage is at Geni, pristime and "factual."

Please understand that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Please pay fair or admit that this is a rigged game.

Catherine Anna Manfredi Yronwode the books of the Bible are written a long time ago. It's a significant story, and we've chosen to represent it.

The story of Josef Halevi's parentage has (so far) not been observed before the late 1800s, and the most compelling theory based on the evidence is that it is an invention by a single person at that time.

Yes, it's a judgment call to cut one and leave the other.

The Geni database is not available in database form outside the Geni organization, and the Geni organization has no facility for doing ad-hoc database queries; even the precise database schema is private. So I'm afraid there's no help to be found on getting it in any form except GEDCOM.

Okay, so you have admitted that it is a rigged game.

'Nuff said.

"Rigged" implies a ruleset, and cheating against those rules.
I believe the way we work is a reasonable way to work, given all the constraints (including the constraint that Geni needs to take in the money required to run the service, both in the short and long term).

Interpret that as you wish.

Catherine, some people have initial difficulty understanding this type of analysis if they haven't had formal training in historiography ("writing history"). Other people find it very intuitive even without training.

The Bible comes to us as a cultural unit. We know it is composed of many documents ("books") written at different times in history. However, there is no general agreement among the experts which parts might be authentic and which parts are perhaps myth.

Therefore, the biblical genealogies have to be treated as a unit. It is not possible to break them in the middle except by a personal belief in the theories of one minority group of scholars or another.

Fortunately for us, there are no proven modern connections to biblical genealogies. That means we don't actually have to worry about trying to figure out where to break the biblical lines.

This type of problem exists for most, if not all, heritage genealogies from around the world.

This problem is also quite different from the problem of evaluating genealogies from later history. There, it is very often possible -- as it is here -- to draw a bright line where the majority of experts judge a line as "not proved".

I personally would like to see Geni be based more on the accurate and not have fictional people showing up in my family tree. It would be nice if there was some way to turn off the inclusion of those marked "Fictional" from appearing as ancestors or descendants in one's own tree so they do not end up restricting and taking computer space from those more accurate family members of your tree.

However, if one is specifically wanting to research like your Jewish or Catholic ancestry, etc. to find one's religious roots, for example, I think it is important to have profiles of religious leaders and their most accurate profiles available along with those persons most accepted by scholars and the like from said religion's holy books or sources. If there is some type of controversy or different interpretations or history of a Biblical person, for example, it would be nice to have an asterix symbol next to the name so one can refer to the About section for a more readily available explanation of the controversy or different interpretations or a note saying see such and such project, etc.

Knowing one's real ancestors makes a major difference in you knowing more of who you are. One's parent's do not always tell you this information and it can make a big difference in understanding why one's parent's or another ancestor maybe ended up being the way they were. I know when I found out from a friend of my father's how my parent's met it gave me a deeper understanding of how world events effected people's personal lives.

My parent's met because of Hitler and WWII basically in that my father quit school to join the Navy, ended up in Nebraska for schooling then an aid to my Great-Uncle who was paralyzed from shrapnel wounds he received during the Battle of St. Lo in France and that is where my parent's met, at his home. So apparently no WWII, no father joining the Navy, no relocation to Nebraska by my father, no paralyzed Great Uncle, NO ME.

When I pass away I want my descendants to know the real truth about me and all our ancestors as best as can be found and recorded. Most of my family is more than colorful enough without having to have fake people in it or fictitious connections to other people. Most of the names in my Geni tree are through connections already found on Geni, except for one line which was on Geni and in a resource book I had which included about 1000 plus names. Also I was fortunate to have a good deal of ancestors more easily able to verify the accuracy of their existence.

It is only after the 1400's and 1300's where the ancestry on most of my lines the accuracy of my tree begins to maybe be questionable, but still highly plausible. And for some lines the accuracy begins to fall apart much farther back, like the 800's maybe, but still showing signs of high plausibility. So I make a mental note of such as these parts of my tree were not added by me personally but through connections to other Geni trees. But considering the few trees in Geni I have thus far connected to and a good majority of the names being added by Curators and/or more advanced genealogist than myself and their providing a good deal of sources to their profiles added, I am more confident than skeptical of those trees I connected to through Geni in regards to accuracy.

Hopefully I have made a reasonably good argument in favor of accuracy over illusion. For those who want story telling I try to put any stories I have about an ancestor into their about section because even if the ancestor was not necessarily famous many of them did have very interesting lives and stories to tell about their world as they knew it. Some of those true stories can be much more interesting than the fictional ones. Even the one story one of my ancestors wrote about riding across the prairies of the Midwest in a wagon with no shock absorbers I found told much about the average life in the 1800's. Some very real descriptions in that story.

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So what does Geni do when there is an elaborate fake - not just the common or garden misconnection of one real person with another real person, but a whole line of illustrious ancestors who connect with real people but are in fact spurious.

A case in point:

John Wodehouse, MP

is, self-evidently, the same man as

John Wodehouse, MP.

But the History of Parliament biography of the second one makes it clear that all of the ancestry of the first profile (and, almost certainly, the family of his wife) is a 17th century fake. If one tries to clear Geni of the fake line, while leaving real people, it will take ages, and the fake line will almost certainly return again.

Mark

Mark, that goes straight to the heart of the problem of managing fake trees.

The problem is really no different from the line back from the earliest Frankish kings to the kings of Troy. It's fake. We all know it's fake. But if we delete it someone is going to re-add it. In fact, the someone who re-adds it might go to great lengths to get it back in because they think scholarship is a stupid way to do genealogy.

So, we know the line has to stay but it also has to be clearly labeled as fake, so when people find a direct line running through it they can ask that it be disconnected.

(It doesn't seem possible to remove the indirect and collateral lines because that would defeat the point of having the line placed to people can see it and see that it's already been identified as fake.)

What many of us do is put the word Fictitious or Fictional in the display name of the fake profiles and get a curator to lock the name field so it can't be changed without a discussion.

That's not the perfect system, but it's the best we've been able to figure out so far.

Actually - why don't you put "FAKE" in the photo field and LOCK that down !

I know I've said this before, though probably elsewhere, but one of the things the World Tree does, with its elaborate fictional and fake lines -- clearly labeled and locked down -

is not only satisfy the users who believe that these things are true, but also allows for a history of genealogy, and a history of what people have believed about their ancient beginnings.

Our methods of establishing true genealogical lines are even now, right this minute, shifting, because of the DNA studies.

But even before that, there were, besides the outright made up fakes, lines that now we consider clearly fictional, but which used NOT to be considered fictional; times changed and methods changed and belief systems changed.

All the lines that go back to the gods and goddesses were not "fictional" when they were created. They were true, according to the understanding of what truth was at that time.

They give us an clear picture of the history of how humans have thought about where they belong, and where they come from, for good and evil.

So yes.

In a completely non-fictional site, there would be no connections to anyone we couldn't verify by historical records.

But to my mind -- even leaving aside the problem of users adding the old trees in again and again -- the old trees are part of the history.

And indeed, they are in the historical records, by which I mean "ancient manuscripts that give genealogies."

The medieval Britons thought they were descended from the heroes of Troy.

They weren't.

But a whole lot of their history and literature says so.

So I'm in favor of keeping that ancient line, and simply making it clear, by the display names and the About sections, that we no longer consider these lines to be true, but that they have a place in history.

Yes. A non-illusory tree, with all reality all the time, would be very different, up in the high branches of the tree, in the ancient branches and many of the branches from the early middle ages.

There are a lot of people we would have to cut, and we'd have no record of the belief system.

King Arthur would go, for instance. And all his cohorts. (Even though many people are convinced that really! no kidding! there was a REAL King Arthur!) Even though a whole bunch of us are, theoretically, cousins of his.

Anyway.

the users who believe that the ancient lines are true, all those lines that go back to the old gods and goddesses, well, they are just the latest incarnations of many generations -- in my own field, it's the Welsh genealogies, and the Irish genealogies, going back, going back, going back.

Because it was important to connect the family to the deities.

This post has gotten blithery blithery blithery, sorry.

But here's the deal.

Geni is a collaborative site, and we all have to work together and compromise.

So the people who want to have no made up humans in the tree end up having to put up with the Fictional label.

And the people who believe in the unsubstantiated lines have to put up with having their ancestors labeled Fictional.

It's a compromise.

We have the ability to label a set of parents as adopted or foster, so a simple solution is to have a new type of parentage: fictitious or spurious, and make sure that DNA does not propagate through (or if it does go through, it does not cause conflict) then everyone should be happy, no?

From past discussions I believe that's somewhere in Geni's future development plans. In the meantime we use the tools we have.

Private User
I like that idea
+1

Then which of the variant fake lines will we choose? All of them?

;)

Private User

+1

All talk of real, sourced, illusory, fictitious, or deliberately faked genealogies is moot because Geni has preferenced certain lineages over others, certain sources over others, certain fictions over others.

In the same way that professional historians and other experts preference certain lineages over others, certain sources over others, and certain fictions over others.

Is that so surprising??

The real struggles are when we fall short of reflecting the preferences of the experts and end up with drama about something that should be obvious.

One of the points here, too, is that a "reliable source" from the 19th century isn't the same as a reliable source from 1400, which isn't the same as a reliable source from 800.

From the 19th century we have wills, and census documents (though not as useful,as they will become), and family Bibles, and court documents about land disputes and sales, and marriage certificates, and histories, and birth records. From 1400, we have court documents and wills and histories, and household account books. From 800, we have histories and charters, and poetry.

And in each of those times, the historiography was different. Historians used different methods, had different purposes, used different sources.

So as historians, we judge the sources and the histories differently depending on when and where they come from, and who wrote them, and to what puposes.

Anne, i would like the link between the Benvenisti family and the Horowitz family restored. Members of my family do not care if it is labelled fictional. We simply want it there so we can follow a family tradition which we believe has validity.

I do not think our request any less valid than another group's request to have King Arthur or the god Vishnu in their family lineage. I do not mock their belief; i take it for what it is -- a tradition -- and i leave it at that.

My grandmother, born in the 19th century, taught me the descent that i believe i have. Thus it is as valid a family tradition to me as the belief that others have in the existence of a lineage from King Arthur or the god Vishnu.

As for documentation -- don't try to tell me that standards are all that great, even now. Try tracing the existence and the family lines of 20th century African American blues musicians some time. Their voices and guitar playing can be heard on recordings, but very few of them can be found on census sheets, draft cards, obituaries, or social security death records. Society deprecated their existence, and thus you will find few, if any, of them, on the World Tree.

https://www.geni.com/projects/Musiciens-du-blues-am%25C3%25A9ricain...

Catherine Anna Manfredi Yronwode my suggestion is to bring it up on the profile that was de linked -- or on the discussion previously mentioned -- so everyone affected by it can weigh in.

I'm Ashkenazi Jewish and "DNA suggests ..." etc. But I don't want ambiguous links in the 13th century coming in through my Anglo American side, which is exactly what happens (46th descendant of King David silliness).

The better solution on geni, for me, is exactly the same as for any other medieval profile or unproven profile: put a link in the profiles to the possible next link in the "overview," and in the "curator note."

This way traditional views can be acknowledged yet best current evidence presented.

Erica, thanks for the link to that project, but it is not the same set of people i was referencing. Eric Clapton, for instance, is not an Afriacan American blues musician. That project includes pretty much all performers alive in the 1980s, black or white, who played electric guitar on rock or blues recordings. I am interested in, and have long researched, musicians recorded from the 1920s - 1940s, whom we call "pre-war" (WWII) or "acoustic" blues performers (those who recorded before the invention of the electric guitar and the electronic keyboard). There were hundreds of them, male and female, folks like Geeshie Wiley, Ben Ramey, Vol Stevens, Hattie Hart, Richard "Rabbit" Brown, Henry Thomas, Waymon "Sloppy" Henry, William Harris, Clifford Hayes, Will Weldon, Mattie Delaney, and more. In some cases they lived long enough to get into the SSDI -- but in other cases, they are basically of unknown parentage, unknown progeny, and unknown ... anything.

Knowing how little is known about these hundreds of recorded artists, i can well believe that documentation will not be perfect or up to modern standards within my own family.

Unlike you, i DO want "ambiguous links in the 13th century coming in through my" tree. Indeed, i find them valuable in my mapping of people by nation, appearance, stated ethnicity, talents and gifts, and so forth

Catherine Anna Manfredi Yronwode please start a project -- I worked on the more celebrity musician blues & jazz artists as a start.

Catherine, my Jewish side "could" have descended from the Chief Rabbj of Prague (and therefore the MaHAREL etc), but I have no evidence but folklore. Do I mislead my family? Do I mislead a casual browser expecting even a minimum of evidence? I can't do that, it's just wrong. So I record the legend, I continue to search. I don't deprive anyone of the what they think is likely: but on an Internet tree, there better be something solid to back the belief.

(please notice - I'm not discussing your particular case, that is to be evaluated by those directly concerned.)

As to lack of records ... some of my Anglo American side was as poor, illiterate and undocumented as your blues men, just not as talented, and from Appalachia, not the Delta. Of course there are no birth certificates, any more than there are for my great grands running from the Cossacks. There are other kinds of genealogical artifacts.